It’s the month of switching back to winter time, so it’s entirely appropriate that I should be reviewing several books that are all about the passing of time and trying to turn back the clock – for very different reasons.
Kang Hwagil: Another Person, transl. Clare Richards, Pushkin Press, 2023
I read this back in September, but it seems more appropriate than ever to review it now, since there has been quite a bit of uproar in South Korea about Han Kang winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. While most people in Korea were delighted and her books sold out in bookshops and had to be reprinted, there were also some virulent criticisms in the men’s forums because she is considered a feminist author.
Kang Hwagil belongs to a generation of even younger feminist authors from South Korea and her book does not shy away from a highly emotive and charged subject matter, namely understanding coercive control and domestic violence in professional and personal relationships, instead of accepting them as the status quo.
Here’s a short attempt at summarising the story. Kim Jina is being publicly condemned for reporting her colleague and superior at work for assault. The problem is that she had been dating her colleague, so she is not believed and in any case condemned for attempting to ruin a good man’s career.
If anyone were to meet me as I am now, they’d likely think me weak – but I haven’t always been this way. I became weak.
I thought if the police investigated him, he’d be put under house arrest, surveillance, something – but none of that happened. I knew nothing about the legal system. I’d likewise thought there’d be protective measures put in place for the victim. I could of course apply for a restraining order. But that took time. I needed evidence as to why he shouldn’t be allowed contact with me, and then that evidence needed to be approved. I didn’t know the laws. I didn’t know the trial would take so long. Believing he would at some point be punished, I waited.
But the trial seems to be dragging on and on, the perpetrator gets away with just a fine and a friend and colleague from work jumps to defend him (so much for female solidarity), so in despair she posts details on a public forum, which provokes even more of a scandal and general disapproval. And then one day she sees a strange post on Twitter, saying she’s a liar and giving her the nickname of ‘vacuum cleaner bitch’. This takes her right back to her student days in her home town, because it used to be the very rude nickname of a classmate of hers, Ha Yuri, who was considered an easy target by all the boys.
She’s so easy. Say you like her and she’ll do whatever you want. The girl’s desperate. Won’t bother to find out what kind of guy you are. She’ll just fall straight in love with you. Like a vacuum cleaner -sucks anything.
Jina has always felt guilty that Yuri died in a traffic accident at young age and that she let Yuri down, not being as good a friend to her as she might have been, because she found her a bit too clingy. She returns to her hometown and to Anjin University, convinced she’ll find who is taunting her with that nickname. Instead, she begins to see the past in a different light, and uncovers memories of a toxic culture which destroyed both Yuri and her own perception of relationships.
Although these stories of abuse will sound almost unbearably familiar, the author does an excellent job at showing the gradual realisation of women that what they have experienced is not normal and acceptable, but also how many of them struggle to accept unpleasant truths about the men they thought they knew.
This is the first full-length translation of a Korean novel by Clare Richards, and she said she chose this book because it had a profound effect on her. Some might say that here in the West we are slightly more advanced in terms of women’s rights, but what can we say when women’s shelters in the UK advise women to not bother to report rapes because it will take many years to go to trial and the whole process will be extremely unpleasant and the outcome very uncertain. So this is a book that will certainly make you fume, cringe, sigh, cry and perhaps become even more militant.
Tudor Ganea: Vreau să aud numai de bine (I Only Want to Hear Good News), Polirom, 2024
Toma, the narrator in Tudor Ganea’s latest novel, has turned forty, an architect who seems to be resigning from every job after a year or so, whose relationship with his wife is not entirely happy, and is undergoing treatment for a nasty tumour – definitely ripe for a midlife crisis. Just then he and his three best friends from high school, whom he left behind in the port town of Constanța, receive a strange message from the mother of their fourth best friend, Mihail, who died in the final year of high school. She is inviting them back for a 22 year memorial of Mihail’s passing. They all show up, but somebody seems to be making fun of them, because there is no one of that name at the address they’ve been given. Instead, they spend the night drinking, misbehaving and reminiscing, and Toma finally faces up to the reasons for the guilt he feels towards Mihail. Although this is not a feminist novel (unlike the other two I’m reviewing today), it would be fair to say that the male characters get a bit of a wake-up call and that the most mature and uncompromising one in their group of friends is the only woman, nicknamed Stup.
It is yet again a well-trodden path, but the author injects it with humour and a very evocative atmosphere of both contemporary Romania and the early 2000s, as well as a loving yet unsentimental description of the rapid changes and general messiness of Constanța. This is the most realistic novel of Ganea’s that I’ve read, his earlier ones are more on the surrealist side of the spectrum, and I missed his more poetic style. I also read this with a view to potentially translating it, but I think the story is too banal and the details which make it rise above the norm are too specific, so will not have an appeal beyond a Romanian readership. But here is a passage which I found to be very revealing and relatable (in my translation):
We were the frail children of the transition and living our adolescence in a schizophrenic manner, stuck somewhere between the rigidity of old-fashioned parenting – which still had considerable authority over us – and the flexibility offered by the winds of change of the 1990s, with its ravishing kaleidoscope of stimulations ready to spring upon us at every step and carry us away from the path our mother and father had envisioned for us. We were the sons and daughters of parents who had been intimidated for decades by a system with severe rules, who’d somehow managed to forge their own path, and now they came out of their shells and found themselves let loose on a playing field where the only rule was that there were no rules, and all the oxygen in the air had been replaced with the strong whiff of emancipation.
Empar Moliner: Beloved, transl. Laura McGloughlin, 3Times Rebel Press, 2024
The main protagonist in this novel, Remei, is a renowned illustrator, not in her 30s or even her 40s, but in her 50s, going through the menopause, realising that her younger husband is falling for a young colleague (a fellow violonist in an orchestra) almost before he realises it himself. It makes her start to question her appearance, her life, her relationship with men, just as she thought she had it all.
This is a disarmingly frank, confident woman who has always been sure of her own merits as well as honest about her shortcomings – and it is this irresistable, no-prisoners-taken voice that guides us through this delectable, often very funny novel. Most of the story is really just Remei musing to herself about ageing and about the relationship between men and women, mothers and children, and women and women, but towards the end she decides to take action and it’s shocking (fear not, there is no graphic violence, but I can’t say more about it).
The novel is translated from Catalan and I notice once more the difference in approach to sexuality compared to English language novels, where it is either handled squeamishly or in a tawdry manner. No, Remei is perfectly calm and comfortable with sharing details about her body and her love life.
Let’s be clear. Until this moment I’ve been considered a well-hydrated, charming mature woman (yes, yes, I don’t look my age, none of us do, everyone says so, we ‘wear our years well’.) I run sixty kilometres a week, go to Body Pump on Mondays and LBT and take collagen pills, despite the studies suggesting their questionable effectiveness. I must point out that I find modesty overrated: I’m still a good deal. What’s more, until now I’ve performed pre-feminist sexual positions with total dedication and delight.
Does Remei want to turn back time? Yes and no. It is more the artistic, exciting side of herself that she misses, that she has now been pushed into domesticity and has therefore become boring (to her husband and even to herself).
I look at her. She’s a new, young version (more predictable, with easier and more intuitive functions) of what I used to be… of the artistic part he liked about me… A new phone for the same SIM, where everything is better optimised… I’m beginning to flicker, I’m about to go out. I’ll shift to domesticity (two artists cannot live together with children, without one ceasing to be so). Cristina will be the artistic life. It’s only a matter of time before they go to bed together…
Remei also has a group of women – and a man – who are running buddies, and through them we see other examples of relationships and are privy to witty social commentary, which may not be directly related to the story, but entertaining nevertheless, such as when she talks about a neighbour who is an author of spy thrillers, always featuring strong women.
If these women he describes were male protagonists rather than female, they’d be something akin to Rambo. But since they’re women, they can raise children, climb, be sensitive, love their excess weight, hack computers (they’re always very talented in detecting security flaws in cyber companies) and have forgettable sexual encounters that never make them suffer or feel insecure. They always have witty comebacks at the ready… There’s no longer any possibility of reading about women who aren’t ‘strong’. But what if you aren’t strong? And no matter how much you search every fictional tale, every single one, you can’t find any sort of redemption? What should what you’d like to read be called? New Contemporary Menopausal Literature, I suppose.
3TimesRebel is a small press that publishes women authors who write in minority languages, and their name comes from this quote by Catalan poet Maria Mercè Marçal: ‘I am grateful to fate for three gifts: to have been born a woman, from the working class and an oppressed nation. And the turbid azure of being three times a rebel.’ On the strength of this book, I’ll certainly be seeking out more of their publications.
findingtimetowrite 